A number of wireless communication systems employ OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex) transmission as a means of communication between a base station and a number of terminals served by that base station. OFDM downlink transmission from the base station to the terminals provides a series of symbols spread over a large number of carrier frequencies. Each of those symbols is provided with a cycle prefix which needs to be of sufficient length for the preceding symbol to have decayed thus minimising the risk of intersymbol interference.
In a typical wireless communication, this prefix length needs to be sufficient to overcome the effects of multipath transmission for those terminals that are relatively distant from the base station. It will be appreciated that multipath transmission can arise from reflections of the radio signal from objects adjacent the transmission path. Because these reflected signals reach their destination via paths that are longer than the direct ‘line of sight’ path, the received signal effectively comprises a number of identical signals having different time delays. The effect is referred to as channel dispersion.
In such a system, due account has to be taken of channel dispersion effects, particularly for terminals that are remote from the base station. In current systems a prefix length is chosen that will accommodate the higher degree of channel dispersion for outlying terminals. However, the ‘worst case’ prefix length that is necessary to provide effective downlink communication with a distant terminal is far longer than is necessary for communication with terminals close to the base station.
OFDM with cyclic prefixes exploits the eigenfunctions of a multipath channel and is therefore considered to be the most efficient signalling method in such environments. However there are technological issues involving the cost of the terminal FFT DSP (fast Fourier Transform digital signal processing) and the required stability of local oscillators. In fact, OFDM as currently implemented exploits the technology in a significantly less than inefficient fashion. This is because the duration of the cyclic prefixes is determined, as discussed above, by the worst case environment. In turn this fixes the symbol duration and sub-carrier bandwidths. When the overall channel bandwidth is fixed, the size of the FFT processing is also determined. This is typically in the 1024-4096 point region which is far too high for a typical user.
In a typical OFDM communications system, the worst case channel dispersion may be seen only by 1% of the terminals and the average channel may have a dispersion value only 1% to 10% of the worst case dispersion. Thus, in the current design paradigm, 1% of the terminals in an OFDM communications system are forcing the remaining 99% of the terminals to have symbol durations 10-100 times larger than is strictly necessary for adequate reception of signal transmissions. While this current method of system design has no significant impact on performance, there is a very significant impact on cost. High stability local oscillators with low phase noise are mandated in supposedly low cost terminals, and a much larger FFT (fast Fourier transform) is used than is ideally necessary which increases the DSP (digital signal processor) load and battery power consumption.
Another problem occurs in channels where the phase of the radio path is unstable due to Doppler shifts or other propagation anomalies. If the phase changes more than 10° or so during the duration of an OFDM symbol then the FFT algorithm used in the receiver, which by design assumes a perfect static channel, is mismatched to the symbol and there is a consequent loss of amplitude of each of the symbols in the frequency bins accompanied by the appearance of cross talk between the frequency bins. The combination of these effects reduces the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of the demodulated symbols and increases the probability of error in the communication channel.
The minimization of the joint problems of channel dispersion and phase instability requires the selection of OFDM symbols which have an intermediate length and which must be selected by in situ measurements in the channel as it is used.